Covered Bridge (6 page)

Fortunately for Fleurette Featherstone Fitchell, Foolish Father Foley from Farrellton was far from fixing her with his fault-finding.

I put that sentence with all the F words in the letter.

Fleurette would like that one.

If I ever found her address.

I also told her as much as I could about Oscar McCracken.

Everybody loved Oscar McCracken.

One of the reasons was that he never missed the mail. He was always on time. He was as regular as the train. When you heard him pull up in his coupe car and when you heard your mailbox squeak (or whatever it did— some mailboxes squealed like little pigs, some groaned like cows, some went chunk like an ax hitting wood), then you knew just about what exact time it was, and you thought of what a nice man Oscar was.

Everybody also loved Oscar because most of the time, maybe all the time, the mail he brought them was nice mail—a letter from a relative from the States; a parcel from Sears or Eaton's, a notice saying pick up that sack of seeds you ordered. (Was I the only one that never got what he wanted from Oscar? A letter from Fleurette?)

And also, everybody loved Oscar because everybody knew what happened to Ophelia Brown and everybody knew how it changed Oscar forever. Everybody knew how he felt. How he got the hump on his back from watching his feet.

And everybody knew that whenever Oscar went through the covered bridge he would stay inside there for a while and have a little chat with Ophelia Brown.

But not very many people talked about what Oscar used to do four times a day inside the bridge. Everybody knew that he'd stop for a bit and have a little chat with his lost lover Ophelia, but because it seemed a little bit crazy they didn't like to mention it much. They didn't like to come right out and say that Oscar McCracken talked to a ghost four times a day.

And I didn't like to say that maybe I saw that ghost one night.

O LVS O. That's what the bridge said.

If they said that, then they'd have to say they believed there was a ghost there or say that Oscar was crazy. They couldn't say right out that they believed Ophelia's ghost was there in the covered bridge because if Foolish Father Foley got wind of the fact that they believed in ghosts, especially in Ophelia Brown's ghost, he would get pretty mad and go into a rage about Evil and everything. Father Foley already kept her out of the graveyard and anyway, Father Foley was in charge of things like ghosts and spirits and he'd be the one to decide about stuff like that. It
wasn't the farmers who were going to decide about things like that. Farmers were in charge of cows and milk and manure and seeds and hay and homemade bread and chickens and things like that.

Foolish Father Foley from Farrellton was in charge of the other world.

That is why when people heard the covered bridge was going to be torn down everybody got very confused.

First of all nobody wanted to talk about Oscar McCracken and Ophelia Brown. If the bridge was torn down, what would happen to poor Oscar? Poor Oscar who everybody loved?

It was O'Driscoll who was one of the first ones to get into the mix-up.

“What was wrong with having two bridges?” O'Driscoll was saying to farmers in the store in Brennan's Hill. “One for the past, one for the future?”

Then I wrote about Oscar's goat to Fleurette.

After Mass one day when Mrs. Ball invited Mrs. O'Driscoll to walk back down the road with her and drop into her niece's place and have some tea, Mr. O'Driscoll and I and Nerves crossed the road for a stroll through the graveyard and then past Old Mac Gleason's house. I noticed from the graveyard that the sexton's cottage where Oscar kept the church equipment and graveyard tools had a pen and a small stable behind it that you couldn't see from the church. In the pen was a goat.

O'Driscoll started the conversation with Old Mac Gleason about the goat.

“You know goats are thought to have originated in China some ten million years ago.” O'Driscoll sounded like he just read a sentence from a school book about goats.

“Well, sir,” said Old Mac Gleason, “this goat originated here as a kid and belonged to poor Ophelia Brown. After she died, Oscar took the goat and still has it. As a matter of fact, Father Foley hired Oscar as the sexton so the goat would keep the grass cut. Shows you how much that Foolish Father Foley knows about goats! Goats aren't lawnmowers! Wasn't long until he had the pen built, though. One day the goat marched right down the aisle into the middle of Father Foley's sermon and started bleating away like she was saying what everybody else felt like saying—”Shut up, you old blatherskite Father Foley”—bleating away at him. The look on Father Foley's face! And the terror in the eyes! You'd think he was staring at the Devil himself!

“There's nothing Father Francis Foley from Farrellton hates worse than having his speeches about Sin interrupted. But that Oscar, he knows goats. Watch the way he feeds that thing. Nothing but the best. Goes out every now and then with that little car and loads it up with the kind of grub the goat loves. Pine branches, young bark, wild roses, clover. And milks her every twelve hours. I never seen a goat live so long. And keep givin' milk, too!
Nice fresh goat's milk keeps that Father Foley nice and fat! I wonder, Mr. O'Driscoll, you being a man who has traveled widely and knowing a lot about a lot of things, do you think that too much goat's milk could affect a fat priest's brain? Make him crazy?”

“No, Mr. Gleason,” said Mr. O'Driscoll. “I don't know anything about that, but I
do
know that the animal called the goat was always hooked up with Sin in the olden days. The old Hebrews in ancient times used to bring two goats to the altar. Then they'd draw lots. One goat went to the Lord and the other to the Devil. That one they called the scapegoat. Then the priest would confess all his sins and the sins of all the people. Then because all the sins were now with the scapegoat, they'd take it out in the bush and let it get away, let it escape.”

Like everybody always was when O'Driscoll told one of his stories, Old Mac Gleason was silent and a bit amazed.

We listened for a while to the polite Sunday morning birds.

“Well, anyways,” Old Mac Gleason said, “that Oscar, he is a queer duck himself since his lady did herself in. Rings the church bell, does the chores, takes the collection, delivers the mail, digs the graves. Never talks to anybody. Strangest package of a man I ever saw!”

I was starting not to like Old Mac Gleason.

O'Driscoll and Nerves and I crossed back over the
road and cut in behind the church in back of the sexton's cottage where the goat pen was.

The goat was black with a white face and white legs and a white beard. She had two black tassles hanging from her throat and curved black horns. Her udder was swollen and her teats pointed straight and were stiff. She was full of milk.

She had a funny look on her face. She looked like a person looks who just pasted a “kick-me” sign on your back and is trying not to laugh while looking you right in the eye.

Suddenly she turned her eyes on Nerves and bleated once at him. Her eyes turned piercing and cold.

Nerves went roaring down the road in a little chuck-wagon of dust.

O'Driscoll and I laughed all the way home. We laughed at the goat bleating at Father Foley and at the goat bleating at Nerves. And we laughed at Old Mac Gleason.

Fleurette would like this part of the letter.

F
ATHER
F
OLEY
was doing something to my mind. For instance, even something that happened to Nerves made me think of Father Foley's sermons.

It was Nerves who first noticed that our potato field was being attacked by bugs. The potato plants were quite high when we took over the farm. Our field was outside our front door and across our side road. We had twelve rows of potatoes, twenty paces long. Since there are about four potato plants in every long pace, there must have been almost a thousand potato plants. More potatoes than we'd ever need. But we could use them for trading for other things we didn't have.

I saw Nerves come out of the potato field through the barbed wire gate. He was looking pretty disgusted. His skin was moving up and down his body. He was shuddering
like someone in a restaurant who just found a cockroach crawling out of his spaghetti.

I went into the potato field to see what it was that made Nerves so nauseated.

On the first potato plant I inspected I counted fiftysix fat orange potato bugs with black spots, munching away on the leaves.

The next plant had even more.

Now I realized what was bothering Nerves.

Nerves hated bugs of all kinds. He always avoided flies, spiders, moths, butterflies, grasshoppers, ants, any kind of bug, whenever he could.

I guess he was just out for a stroll in the potato patch when he looked around and realized that he was surrounded by over 55,000 bugs. And all related to each other. Poor Nerves was outnumbered.

I got some empty Habitant Pea Soup cans that were piled on a shelf in our shed just next to the potato field.

By holding a Habitant Pea Soup can under the leaf of the potato plant and using a flat stick, you could knock the bugs into the can.

At first they made a pinging noise when they hit the bottom of the can, but then things got quieter and more disgusting as the can filled up.

I put the first full can on the gatepost and started a new one. I was starting to feel like Nerves must have felt, his skin crawling up and down his body.

Mrs. O'Driscoll came up to the gate with Nerves behind her.

She pulled on the gate but it stuck a bit, so she yanked a little harder. That caused the Habitant Pea Soup can, full to the top with potato bugs, to fall off the gatepost, dumping most of the bugs on top of Nerves.

Nerves was stunned. He stood still as a statue while the bugs spread over his body like bees. Nerves' eyes, which normally were kind of beady, were wider than Mrs. O'Driscoll or I had ever seen them. It didn't seem possible that his eyes could expand and bulge out like that.

Then his mouth opened wide like he was screaming, but no sound was coming out.

Then he took off as fast as his little legs could churn and kick up grass and dirt, down around the ice house, and we heard the splash as Nerves hit the water of Mushrat Creek.

“Well,” said Mrs. O'Driscoll out of the corner of her mouth, “we'll find out now if potato bugs can swim or not.”

We ended up with seven cans of potato bugs.

The stove in the summer kitchen was roaring hot, ready for baking bread.

Mrs. O'Driscoll and I dumped the bugs into the flames. What a stink for a while.

I couldn't help thinking about Father Foley.

The stink and the flames.

Of Hell.

N
OT LONG AFTER
we heard the first dynamite go off and saw the first dead fish float down Mushrat Creek, a poster went up in the store at Brennan's Hill.

MEN WANTED

BRIDGE CONSTRUCTION

MUSHRAT CREEK

Carpentry, Cement, Steel,

Laborers.

THE LAZY NEED NOT APPLY!

Madame Ovide Proulx

Proulx Construction

A lot of farmers were crowded around the poster.
They read “Madame Ovide Proulx.”
Madame
Proulx? A
woman
?

A
woman
building a bridge?

How could that
be
?

O'Driscoll and I went up to the place where the new bridge was going to be.

It was an ugly sight.

Blown-up trees and bulldozers and mud and big gashes out of the sides of beautiful Mushrat Creek.

O'Driscoll got in a line-up and got hired on as a carpenter. While he was signing his work card I saw him saying something to the woman in charge. She looked up at me. Then O'Driscoll waved for me to come over.

“Madame Proulx wants to hire you. She needs a nail puller. You get eighty cents an hour. You work from seven in the morning until six at night, one hour for lunch, only half days on Saturday.”

Mrs. Proulx looked at me.

“Can you pull nails?” she said.

“Out of wood?” I said.

“Of course, out of wood. What did you tink, you pull dem hout of da hair?”

“Pardon?”

“Did you think you'll pull them out of the air?” O'Driscoll said, helping me out.

“Yes, I can pull nails,” I said, ignoring her sarcasm.

“Sign ere!” said Mrs. Proulx.

I had a job.

I was already figuring out the money. Ten hours a day would be eight dollars. Five times eight. Four more dollars for Saturday. Forty-four dollars a week! I could buy more red paint with that. And other stuff for the bridge—lamp oil, wicks.

We started work the next day.

For the next few days, before I went to bed, I'd try to tell Fleurette about what it was like.

A farmer or two from almost every house along the road and by the river and up and down the valley were working on the new bridge.

There was rock and earth to be moved and holes to be dug and forms to be built and cement to be poured and steel to be laid.

The foreman of the job was French and he was from Maniwaki. His name was printed on the side of the truck and the end of the big generator. His name was Ovide Proulx (pronounced PROO).

His wife, Mrs. Proulx (pronounced PROO, too) was in charge of the Time, the Tools and Supplies and the Pay Envelopes.

All the farmers called her Prootoo.

On Fridays, Prootoo rang the bell at six o'clock sharp and the farmers lined up in their blue overalls and waited while she called out their names and made them step up for their envelope of money. She also sometimes searched the farmers for stolen tools or nails.

Sometimes there was money taken out of the farmers' pay envelopes for a tool they maybe lost or broke.

Everybody was afraid of Prootoo.

Except Mr. Proulx, the boss.